If you were to ask an accomplished author of any sort what their writing process is, they would undoubtedly provide you with a long list of steps, beginning with the initial rough draft, countless revisions in between, and concluding with minor fixes of anything from syntax to grammar. This might come as a surprise to most, as people tend to assume that writing flows naturally for authors. If this same question was asked to a high school or college student, 80% of them would likely have completely different answers. These students whip up a draft, glance over it quickly, maybe make one or two minor adjustments, then send it off for grading. I am not ashamed to admit that I am a part of that 80%. Throughout the entirety of high school, and probably even school in general, I was a one-draft writer. It did not matter how the paper was weighted; it could be a project, lab report, research paper, anything. One draft was all I ever produced. The best example of this without a doubt is my final research paper for a science fiction class during my senior year of high school. There is no question in my mind that this paper simply titled “The Forever War” is the quintessence of my poor writing habits.
The first step to understanding my thought process while writing the paper is to understand the teacher, Mr. Duncan. This man was absolutely the biggest influence on my writing of this paper. Mr. Duncan was one of those classic, super enthusiastic, yet completely out of touch teachers who thought he knew what students found interesting but in reality had no clue. He’s the type of teacher to chuckle at his own jokes while the class watched in an awkward silence. Sometimes he would go off on rants that nobody understood, and were completely irrelevant to the topic of discussion. Most of the time, we didn’t even know what triggered them. There were times where Mr. Duncan would ramble on about anything that crossed his mind, and no actual work would get done for the entire 80-minute class period. You’d think such a unique personality would have an unmeasurable impact on the actual assignment, but the fact of the matter is, he had almost none. The task assigned to us was so broad, and he was so easy going, that the topic was wide open. The actual assignment was an essay that had to outline the major ideas in a science fiction book of our choosing. Since everyone had a different book, and a different sub-genre to work with, he gave essentially no further guidance. As a result, the final products varied greatly. So, I guess in a way, he influenced me to think uniquely about my topic, just as he does on a regular basis.
As a writer, I’ve always performed better when the guidelines for the assignment were clearly laid out. I’ve never been great at carving my own path through the confusion that is a research paper, and this one was absolutely no exception. My book was “The Forever War” written by Joe Haldeman. Honestly, if you asked me what the book was about, I would most likely just describe the events themselves rather than the main ideas, or the issues Haldeman was trying to portray. It is for that exact reason this essay gave me such a hard time. Essentially, the novel is about an intellectually and physically gifted man, William Mandella. Mandella and other equally gifted men and women are recruited to fight in an ongoing war, as the title would suggest, between the humans and an alien race called the Taurans. The novel touches on many ideas that parallel to society today, such as military training, physics, and Haldeman’s analysis of human nature. In my essay, I wrote about these topics, dedicating about a page to each. For military training, I talked about the rudimentary drill these high-caliber recruits were undergoing, and compared it to the Marine Corp’s OCS, or Officer Candidacy School. The next idea, physics, led me to touch on the heavy use of time dilation, and how it seemed to be, to my understanding, accurate. The last major theme was, again, Haldeman’s view on human nature. For this theme I talked about the structure of the war, and how it reflected world war II and other wars of that era. The essay also discussed man’s dependence on war, and the repetition of the same mistakes. Without a doubt, the hardest part for me was finding these themes. Once I picked them out, however, the structure for my essay had been created, and all I had left to do was put the pieces together.
Before I even started writing, I forced myself to look back through the novel, trying to pick out certain pieces that would support a possible theme. Eventually I found the three topics, but I didn’t know too much about them. So, I conducted a good deal of research, reading many stories about OCS, USMC training procedures, and time dilation. I even found a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said “Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology — global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration.” I remember being utterly enthusiastic when I discovered it, because the words blended perfectly with my third idea, and with the essay as a whole. Because of all this, it was a very long time before I even got words down on paper, which is pretty common for me as a writer. I didn’t even start typing it until about a day before the deadline, which was, again, not unusual. I always say that I write better when I’m in a deadline induced panic, but that’s just a fancy excuse for my constant procrastination. Once I did finally begin writing it, the words just flowed out of me, and the ideas pieced themselves together as I typed. I knocked out one major theme after another, then began comparing their portrayal in the fictional society to today’s society, and all of a sudden there were almost five pages in front of me. I blasted through the physics section, because it interested me most, making it the most descriptive and structured. I even discussed formulas, and theoretical concepts. This, however, was both good and bad. Good because it added credibility, and legitimacy to the paper, and bad because it affected the form of the essay, and made some of the other topics seem under developed. Reading the essay now, it is very clear that I put the most effort into this section. This definitely hurt me in the long run, and I should have put the same passion into the other two themes. After completing the main bulk of the writing, all that was left was the conclusion. I had no idea how to go about it, so I decided to reread the entire essay to that point, and used that insight to put together a cohesive conclusion that would hopefully tie up any loose ends. As sad as it may sound, this is probably the most sophisticated writing technique I used while writing this essay.
An actual author might approve of my writing process up until this point, however they would undoubtedly call it a ‘good start’ rather than a ‘finished product’. This is where my writing process differs from a legitimate author. I have to admit, looking back I cannot condone my actions, but all I did to better my essay after finishing the first draft was a quick scan for the red or green squiggly lines that would indicate a spelling error or a grammatical mistake. At no point did I print it out, read it out loud, make actual revisions to the theme, structure, voice, or anything of the sort. As I said before, I am a one-draft writer, and this paper, regardless of its importance was not immune. There are many reasons to why this paper never reached revision, lack of motivation, procrastination, lack of structure of the assignment, senioritis, but most of it can be blamed on bad habits. I can’t say this is the only time I’ve handed in a big assignment without revising, and I’m sure it will not be the last. For this paper especially, no matter how many times I told myself I was going to spread the work out, or make revisions, I always knew in the back of my mind what was going to happen, and I was completely right.
After reflecting on my process of writing this very crude essay, I’m shocked I got as good a grade as I did. That seems to be a common occurrence, though, and most likely allowed the for the development of my poor writing habits in the first place. In any case, it should be abundantly that just because my writing process brought about good grades doesn’t make it effective. Although I did have some strong techniques, such as rereading the essay in order to make the conclusion cohesive, and conducting research and planning before writing, I would still say my process has room for improvement. When it comes down to it, being a one-draft writer is unnecessarily stressful, risky, and flat out shows that you do not take pride in your work, and you should not make it a regular practice.